[fingerprinter]

I have long held that Amazon(.com) has some of the worst UX I've ever seen, and it still is able to sell massive amounts to consumers.

We are left to consider that perhaps UX, particularly to the mass market, really doesn't matter. Or maybe that Amazon has such an entrenched lead, mindshare or other, it can weather some horrible, horrible experiences.

Considering that AWS is almost identical on the cloud front, I'm not sure really what to think here.

I'm a programmer. I use cloud services everyday. I have actively stayed away from AWS in the past few years b/c it has such a bad UX/DX and yet....it grows.

Azure is better. GCP is better. AWS, when compared to those two objectively, is downright terrible. Their services are disjoint. Their command lines don't work together. Their web console? Hooooooollllllly mother of god.....

I guess I don't know what to make of Amazon. Developers seem to fawn over things like Heroku, Zeit, GitHub and they are hugely successful in their own right....but still AWS is used by developers and, IMO, it shouldn't be anymore. It's 2018 and AWS is very clearly stuck in the 1970s/80s DX. They just don't get it, or maybe they do? And DX doesn't matter to most developers?

If we are honest with ourselves, AWS should be in third place in 2018. And it shouldn't even be close. Their services are comparable to the point of no real differentiation to their competition, and they have worse billing, worse experience, worse DX, worse support and overall worse nearly everything.

And yet they grow.

So yes, Amazon.com and AWS are terrible. And for some reason it doesn't seem to matter. I would like to live in a world where it does, particularly for developer tools where I hope that developers have more taste and sense than the choice of AWS shows.

[tschwimmer]

Can't speak to AWS, but I know that the e-commerce side of Amazon.com is A/B tested to within an inch of its life. They test absolutely everything, including colors, size, layout, spacing, etc to check for the best conversion rate. They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this site optimization and they're constantly running experiments.

It may not be good UX as measured by some aesthetic standard or set of best practices, but the site is accomplishing its goal for Amazon and arguably the consumers who use it.

[nikofeyn]

that seems like the google way of building product. you test all these micro changes but miss out on the macro changes the site actually needs, which doesn't really work out. no one can argue that amazon has good ux. from product to product and day to day the website layout changes. each product site has just a ton of data thrown up on it. it has horrible tracking of product purchases. for example, if looking at a paperback book, it gives no indication that you may have purchased the hardcover. it has terrible management of books that may have multiple editions. buying older books takes some time because they'll often have multiple pages for the exact same book. pre-ordering is a mess. i have been sent two video games before because i pre-ordered a game super early which then apparently got a new product page. i thought i had never pre-ordered it some time later and amazon didn't mention it, so i ordered it again since it gave no indication i had ordered that exact product. the search is not great either. comparing products is non-existent. just cycling through various options like color can be a chore just to see a different price.

just because they have a process doesn't mean it works. but yea, like someone said, i guess the general user doesn't care. i know it has lessened my use of the site.

[bevax]

And there might have well reason to change the small things only, but nothing fundamentel. People hate change. If they start to turn the website upside down, their customers would start to whine, and cry, and complain. A lot of wasted time they could spend with buying stuff.

So, it ugly and bad as hell, but everybody is trained and accustomed to it. Why risking confusing customers without need?

[hef19898]

True that. Just two thoughts on it:

1) You can A/B test yourself into a corner. They are definitely doing it right, whether it is the right thing to do is a different question.

2) Having some process insight into the operations / logistics side I can confirm that everything thing is connected to the webside one way or the other. That is what gives Amazon its huge operational advantage. Downside is, with everything developed in-house, this approach can end up as a motely collection of legacy systems. And that makes changing things difficult and had the potential to become a major pain in the ass long term.

[johnrgrace]

Ex amazonian here, all of the internal systems have well defined API interfaces. So long as you don't blow up the API's you can replace any legacy system you want because it doesn't have tendrils that reach into 50 other systems.

[7373737373]

Maybe they are A/B testing in a local maximum

[ProAm]

> They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this site optimization

Maybe they should A/B test this team and go with the other one.

[pageandrew]

Pretty doesn’t necessarily mean effective at converting. I think Amazon’s team is perfectly competent at testing whether one design makes more money than another — and I think they’re competent enough to go with the one that makes more money.

[londons_explore]

I have a suspicion they A/B test the little things, like is it better to show the price in dollars or the local currency, and is it better to have a 'add to cart' or 'buy it now' button.

They miss the big changes like 'shall we show all the products in a 3d immersive VR gallery' or 'make a site which downloads all data and works entirely offline'.

Those big changes might usually fail, but if you never try any of them, you'll end up with a site that looks and behaves like it's from the 1990's, while the rest of the world has moved on.

[notyourwork]

They do try those things too. You under estimate how much experimentation goes on in Amazon.

[scotty79]

Giraffe was also A/B tested to within an inch of life:

https://i.imgur.com/NP50sD1.jpg

[dplgk]

If they are always testing why does it seem like the UI never changes? Because the changes are so incremental?

[calaphos]

Sounds like they are stuck in a local optimum with their site.

[kordlessagain]

> and arguably the consumers who use it

The consumers who use it have no goal other than getting stuff they think they need, faster.

[colechristensen]

This is a shallow view of AWS and Amazon.

Amazon is successful because it has mostly everything in stock and can get most of it to you in 2 days. Amazon is logistics and trust. The trust is eroding and the logistics is worse because they're delivering things themselves, but still that is why it is.

AWS has more than Azure and GCP.

Appearances and experience aren't the whole of a product. Overfocus on them as a producer or consumer is a problem.

[fingerprinter]

That's the thing, it largely _doesn't_ have more than Azure or GCP these days. And for 80%, maybe 90% of all use cases in existence, AWS v Azure v GCP from a pure catalog offering perspective is identical. And when that compounds with other factors, it falls far behind.

Obviously Amazon.com is different and it's mostly about logistics, inventory and reduced buyer friction among some other things.

[throwaway98121]

I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement.

I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is.

That all being said, I think Amazon is turning into EBay with all the garbage ads I see on the website, just trying to buy replacement toothbrush heads, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

[thirdsun]

> I would go on a limb and say that Amazon doesn’t invest in better UX because that’s not what most of their customers care about. Someone at that company has already done the math and decided investing in Amazon Go or 1 hour delivery or Whole Foods is a far better return than investing in UI improvement.

I imagine a company like Amazon has the resources to do both.

> I do think people in this discussion are looking at this from a developer or designer point of view. I read some article a while ago about how Amazon saw a increase in sales from millisecond level improvement in page loads. I bet that’s what they optimize for, and less so on how pretty the UX is.

Same point. These features, performance and an attractive user interface, aren't mutually exclusive. I'd argue that in fact both are tightly coupled and are part of what makes the design and user experience.

[scarface74]

I’m a developer and I play the resident certified AWS Architect when necessary. For me, the “interface” that I use every day is not the website. It’s either the CLI, Boto3 (Python), or the C# SDK.

[kondro]

One of the reasons Amazon has been able to achieve so much diversity around what you can do with their cloud systems is because they allow the individual teams to build and manage their own services.

I'd argue that if they were building towards one, big, consistent UX (a UX they'd prefer to use the APIs and command-line tools directly anyway, rather than the GUI), that they wouldn't have the amount of functionality, breadth-of-coverage or marketshare they have today.

[scarface74]

AWS’s user interface is inconsistent, and as someone who uses most of the different services in a given week - the DevOps, NetOps, and developer portions - I just don’t use the website that often during a given day, I’m almost exclusively either using one of the SDKs or the CLI.

Out of all the things I care about, the user interface is not one.

[cheeze]

This was going to be my point. AWS delivers a minimum viable product and heavily iterates on it. Usually features are prioritized over "upgrade the piece of shit angular app we use for the console."

I might run through the console to learn how something works, but in general I'm interacting with AWS through a terminal, and doing so that way is generally quite enjoyable.

I agree that GCP at least is a better experience for me as a developer, but I'm not sure if that translates directly into better anything for a customer of mine.

[shishy]

Can you offer more specifics about what you think is so terrible about its UX?

To me it's rather simple and clean, and I would expect that they have a vast team of UX experts testing their site to make sure it meets their overall product goals.

Besides, what you might find aesthetically pleasing is not necessarily pleasing to a global population of users with varied backgrounds/diverse age groups -- e.g. older generations might prefer the super simple fonts and general design standards that were more prevalent one or two decades ago.

[philsnow]

Some product pages have images that zoom when you hover them, some instead have images that pop open in a (terrible) lightbox. No rhyme or reason as far as I can tell why some are one way and some are the other.

Especially for electronics or computer parts, if you don't know _exactly_ what you're looking for down to the part/model number, you're not going to get any help on amazon.com. I get the feeling they don't do any actual categorization (like say newegg seems to do) and instead you're actually getting just full-text search on product descriptions.

If you really want the part soon, you'd be fine with either "Prime" or "Prime FREE One-Day", right? But you can't search for both at the same time, for some reason they are mutually exclusive. So you duplicate the browser tab and search for "Prime" options in one and "Free One-Day" options in the other, like a caveman banging two tabs^W rocks together. I just noticed there's yet another option, a checkbox under "Delivery day" reading "Get It by Tomorrow".

If you _do_ know exactly what you want, good luck getting it because of the whole similar products from different sources getting intermingled in inventory.

I'm frankly blown away by how user-hostile the whole thing is. Prime shipping buys a lot of goodwill, it seems.

[hef19898]

Up until two or three ywars ago Amazon did a tremendous job on catalogue data. Then the catalogue started to show the first issues of bad master data. It is hard work to maintain such large set of product master data, sure. But in the end I had the feeling that quality decreased. Add marketplace and third parties to the mix and it is a complex problem that needs constant maintenance directly impacting CX.

[slededit]

I think it mattered originally, when they were one of many. But once you are on the website the reliability of shipping, and simply the fact they already have my credit card is a major factor in repeat business.

It was probably much more important in the early days than it is now.

[derefr]

AWS's biggest customers are and always have been enterprises who have existing ops teams and existing data-centres, and are trying to "add cloud" or "migrate to cloud" the services that are running on those data centres, without either breaking SLAs with customers, or disrupting the workflows of those existing enterprise ops staff.

There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway?

[sanderjd]

> There is no reason to use AWS for green-field software development. But who's even doing that, these days, anyway?

I mean, lots of people are, right? I'm not myself, so I guess I don't really know, but surely lots of people are still making green-field software (if not, I think our industry is in some trouble...) and presumably a reasonably high proportion of those people are using the current #1 cloud hosting provider. Which part of this is wrong?

[scarface74]

By definition if you are doing stuff on prem and then you start using AWS’s products like lambda, SQS, Fargate, etc you are doing green field projects.

[mr_toad]

> I have actively stayed away from AWS in the past few years b/c it has such a bad UX/DX and yet....it grows.

A lot of people are probably using something like puppet/chef/ansible/terraform and don’t encounter the web console very often.

[throwaway98121]

IMO using the web console for your cloud development sounds like your a tiny shop. Your infrastructure and all that configuration should be in code and version control.

I think CloudFormation is difficult to use and could be much easier, but ops rant about the AWS UI being unfriendly makes it sound like he’s not really the kind of customer AWS is really after.

[jacobsenscott]

We are a tiny shop and I use ansible whenever possible. Even managing two or three ec2 instances with the UI is a nightmare. IMO that's a feature - you should start with a cms when small. Not bolt it on when it is too late. I'm looking into terraform though. Ansible's aws support is fairly limited.

[toomuchtodo]

You will love Terraform. I highly recommend it over Cloudformation or any configuration management cloud-specific extensions.

[scarface74]

The reason that you should use CloudFormation is that if you are working for a business, they most likely have a business support agreement with AWS. If you ever come across an issue, you have an easy button - AWS’s excellent support.

[toomuchtodo]

I've found Hashicorp's support to be superior to paid AWS support. YMMV.

[jhwang5]

I don't think you really get why enterprises buy managed cloud services, or why consumers buy in general. Your purchasing criteria seems out of tune with what consumers care the most about: selection, price, service.

[fingerprinter]

I'd agree with this for amazon.com and consumers.

That still doesn't explain AWS v Azure or GCP which have similar (or better) services, more than competitive pricing and in Azure's case, waaaaay better support.

In fact, everything about AWS is typically worse. Perhaps AWS entered the 'no one ever got fired for buying AWS territory' even when there are a ton of better options out there. If that's the case, kinda sucks for devs who are stuck using their crappy services when so many others exist.

[sokoloff]

It would be hard for me to imagine better support than we get from AWS support. Yes, we're paying for enterprise support and that's not inexpensive, but the support itself is phenomenal.

We literally have AWS technical generalists on-site once a week and they bring in subject matter experts on specific topics/services as-needed, sometimes on-site, sometimes via video.

[jhwang5]

I think part of it is AWS still has the broadest feature set. Also, the "dev ex" part gets easier especially if you are using AWS services through its CLI, and not through the console.

Agreed that the console's UX violates almost every UX principle in terms of its use of signifiers, etc.

[pmiller2]

I can’t speak to Azure, but GCP is backed by Google, and Google has a long history of killing off products. That’s not something I’d like to base my business on.

[codeduck]

AWS in general feels like an undead survivor of 90's enterprise java websites.

[puranjay]

In India, we have Flipkart which is bigger than Amazon. I recently went back to using it and realized that their UX is so much cleaner and better looking than Amazon. Images are uniform, the text is well formatted, the colors aren't just a jumble of grays and the odd orange

[kanox]

> And DX doesn't matter to most developers?

I'm a developer and don't know what that is.

[pandapower2]

Presumably developer experience, the developers experience working with a particular project, tool or whatever.

Sometimes referred to as "dev x".

[r00fus]

Developer UX.

[pbw]

See Richard P. Gabriel's essay http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

[bg24]

Newer the product, more likely they will learn and build a better product. AWS console is very old. That said, most developers do not use the console.

[vinceguidry]

If DX mattered to developers then we'd all still be using Rails. But generally the reaction I get when I highlight DX as a reason to pick technology is a misguided and masochistic "pick the right tool for the job" mentality.

I would love to see developers prioritizing themselves better. But they don't, themselves, do this.

[scarface74]

Since when were developers clicking around on a website to develop?

[NeedMoreTea]

DX? This is new to me, and search finds nothing enlightening or seems like it might be relevant. "Deus ex machina" perhaps? :)

[lmitchell]

Presumably 'developer experience', given how it's used in conjunction with 'user experience' for a developer-focused product :)

Admittedly not the most easily understood acronym, and I'm sort of guessing.

[NeedMoreTea]

Thanks. Of course now it seems obvious enough in context that I should have inferred this. Oh well. :)

[IncRnd]

If you search for

UX DX

you will find lots of hits about.

[Ibethewalrus]

Dev ex machina :)

[danmur]

I find amazon.com functional in a lot of ways, but it's definitely ugly and inconsistent and sometimes quite difficult to use. That aside though can you imagine if they did a significant reskin? Better or worse they would get torn to shreds. I bet that's at least a factor in what they decide to do.

[dageshi]

I think in the case of amazon.com, the people who go there usually know what they want, they go, they search and the results they get are good enough.

It's actually a terrible site to "browse" if you're looking for something but not really sure what, but if you know roughly what you want it works fine.

[tfolbrecht]

Maybe AWS's web console was ugly. Their CLI app, APIs, SDKs definitely aren't.

[fipple]

I don’t use Amazon for the website, I use it because it brings shit to my house in a day or two. Companies with tremendous market power often have shitty customer experiences.